China

China. It’s so big that its national day is celebrated for three days. Yes. That’s right—from 1-3 October this year the Chinese will be celebrating. It’s the celebration of the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China. Yes, we all know that China’s been around a lot longer—thousands of years—but it’s current political form started with the declaration of the People’s Republic. Oh, and China? Great Wall of China. The Terracotta Army. Ming Dynasty art and Ceramics. Beautiful films by Wong Kar-wai.

People will often talk about the fact that China is the most populous country in the world (over 1.3 billion people…) but we should also remember that it’s the world’s third largest country in area—behind Russia and Canada. I’m sure that those of us who play trivial pursuit or stare at maps a lot already know that, but other than knowing “oh yeah, Russia’s the biggest” there are probably others who would have a bit of trouble ranking the top five (the next two are USA and Brazil… I admit, without checking I would have put Australia in at five. Let’s call it blind affection.) It’s not all the hustle and bustle of the eastern coastline, either. There’s the Gobi desert, the forest steppes, as well as subtropical forests and the Himalayas. There’s a lot going on.

And, you know, Marco Polo went to China… (Though there are certainly scholars out there that assert he never made it to China. I will leave the debate up to more learned people, and go with the stories of my childhood on this one. Happy, as always, to be proven wrong.)

As for the People’s Republic of China… well, forget all the dynasties. It’s Mao Zedong, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution… There’s a lot I wouldn’t have wanted to live through, even if it did eventually lead to the cessation of such things as foot-binding (though there are still women living who have bound feet… incidentally, the story of Cinderella originates in China, with the tradition of foot-binding. It is a story about fitting a tiny shoe to prove nobility…) So, the Great Leap Forward took on the model of the Five-Year Plan. The first step? Well, part of it was increase the production of steel, while also doubling agricultural production. This ran into trouble pretty quickly. I mean, peasants weren’t really equipped to make steel, authorities were misreporting the production numbers, and while they were making low-quality steel—much of which couldn’t be used—they weren’t tending to many other things. So, there was a famine—which Mao Zedong wanted to hide from the world to save face, so he exported much of the grain that was still being produced. Millions died. And the Cultural Revolution? Abolish the old. That is: the Old Customs, the Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas. Okay. What next?

After Mao’s death the economy transitioned to a mixed economy with an increasingly open market. But democratic freedoms remained—and still remain for many—elusive. 4 June 1989. Tiananmen Square. The People’s Liberation Army is ordered to fire on the people. Some of the images from Tiananmen are unforgettable—in particular, a man, standing in front of a tank. The world reacted, condemning China for its actions.

And yes, these days China is still considered to be one of the countries with the least press freedom. It’s believed that human rights violations are widespread. And China is head of the class when it comes to the number of executions. There are environmental concerns too. But you know, a lot of what I’ve written here is about the government. The events of the twentieth century are a tiny portion of the story.

Today’s poem is by Che Qianzi. It comes from Language for a New Century. Have I bullied you into buying this volume enough yet? I was sitting by the Canal in Washington DC the other day, reading it…


Sentences

1: A spire in the north. A spire in the south. In the south a nail
 was pulled out.

2: A half moon, two earths, one earth, very soft when stepped on,
 very soft shyster.

3: The gods appear to have freckled faces; the masses’ point of view;
 the rubble creeps over the branches; you are going to hunt birds.

4: A box that cannot keep secrets, darkness and Jiangsu Province,
 will be reduced to a leaky cage. In the cage there is nothing,
 the background contains it.

5: A water drop too is curved.

6: Lace words on the cuff, Tailor Song threads the eye of the needle.
 Shrimp heads twisted off their bodies.

7: Tadpoles drifting between commas, differentiated by their tails, were
 finally expelled from the fictitious revolutionary troop. Transformed
 into iron-skin green frogs, with the press of a button they jump
 without stop, without stop.

8: One sentence is no longer than one character. The character gets a big
 head. The character becomes a big star. A spire. Ursa Major
 hammering bright the nails in the north. 

9: One sentence circled three times around one character, circling
 the fourth time it broke. 

—Che Qianzi
translated by Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas and Yang Liping
from Language for a New Century